Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy talks Community, Craft and AI
Why RuneScape’s political system might be the most underrated retention strategy in gaming.
RuneScape isn’t just a live game.
It’s a long-running democracy with its own rules, culture, and identity, and Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy says managing it often feels more like running a government than a studio.
In a recent Sett Podcast, Bellamy broke down:
How Jagex balances Legacy Systems, Aging Audiences, New Projects & AI
Tried to bring up the highlights for ya here :))
Community as a Political System
RuneScape’s foundation is not monetization or UA.
It’s governance and trust.
The 70 Percent Rule
Old School RuneScape’s constitution is simple:
No update ships unless players approve it with 70 percent+.
“What you’re really running is a community, and that feels a lot more like government than game development.”
Devs Are Players
Many Jagex employees still play the game daily.
When an update goes live, they feel the impact personally.
This creates internal accountability few studios can replicate.
Surprise vs Transparency
Surprise drops are hard in a democracy.
Jagex solves this with:
- Temporary modes
- Seasonal experiments
- Non-core side content
These keep the world fresh without breaking trust.
A Grown-Up Community
RuneScape’s average player age is now around 31.
Decision-making has matured alongside the audience, shifting the studio’s role from parent to partner.
Dragonwilds & Cadence Problem
Jagex’s new premium survival title, Dragonwilds, has already sold more than 900,000 units in early access.
The challenge:
RuneScape players want weekly updates.
Survival game players are used to seasonal rhythms.
Bellamy calls this the Cadence Conflict, and the team is now working on resetting expectations while scaling production behind the scenes.
AI: Modernising RuneScript Without Losing the Soul
Bellamy is optimistic about AI in one very specific way.
AI Will Not Write RuneScape Content
RuneScape’s tone, “quirky, dry, Monty Python-like”, is too human to automate.
AI Will Modernise Infrastructure
RuneScape still runs on RuneScript, a proprietary language only around eight people in the world can write.
Rewriting the engine isn’t realistic.
The breakthrough:
AI models now translate Python → RuneScript, opening the engine to more developers and removing long-standing bottlenecks.
“AI can now help abstract Python into RuneScript, meaning many more people can interact with parts of the engine that were once accessible to only a handful.”
This is one of the smartest AI applications in gaming:
preserving identity while speeding up production.
Mobile as a Second Door, Not a Second Game
Bellamy sees mobile as an “access point”, not a platform strategy.
Unified World
Same account
Same server
Same progress
Same community
Admitting the Gaps
Mobile onboarding and membership flows “aren’t good enough”.
Jagex is now applying modern UA discipline to reduce friction, especially for players returning after a decade.
The Loyalty Advantage
Bellamy’s strongest theme is consistency.
Tools and frameworks change every few years, but community loyalty takes decades to build.
“I can’t name a tool from the last five years I still feel loyal to. But I can name brands and games that earned loyalty over a long time. You can’t force it or fake it.”
This is RuneScape’s real moat:
not speed, not tech, not monetization, trust.
What Mobile Gaming Leaders Can Learn
A compressed playbook for senior teams:
1. Governance is a retention loop.
Transparency creates stickiness.
2. Trust beats short-term monetization.
You only get one chance to break it.
3. Legacy systems can be modernised, not replaced.
AI translation layers are a powerful new pattern.
4. Mature communities demand mature communication.
Age shifts change design philosophy.
5. A consistent brand outperforms a perfect toolset.
Longevity is the real compounding asset.
6. Surprise can coexist with transparency.
You just need the right playgrounds.
Final?
In an industry chasing the next big trend, this is the kind of long-term thinking mobile leaders rarely get to see up close.
RuneScape’s secret isn’t that it survived for 25 years.
It’s that the community still feels ownership after 25 years.
Jagex didn’t build a game.
They built a nation inside a fantasy world:
one governed by trust, protected by consistency, and modernised carefully through AI.
